Trump Says He Heard Frederick Douglass Was Alive from Betsy DeVos

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—After raising eyebrows by suggesting that he believed that Frederick Douglass was still alive, Donald Trump revealed on Wednesday that everything he knew about Douglass had come from his Education Secretary nominee, Betsy DeVos.

Before his breakfast meeting to mark Black History Month, Trump told DeVos, “Betsy, write down everything you know about black history so I can read it at the meeting. She took out a pen and did it in, like, three minutes. She’s fantastic.”

Impressed by the one-sentence summary that DeVos wrote about Frederick Douglass, Trump said that he was now considering Douglass for a top White House post.

“Based on what Betsy said about him, we could really use Fred’s energy around here,” Trump said.

He lashed out at the press for reporting that Frederick Douglass was dead, calling those reports “very unfair.”

“That’s a nasty thing to say about someone who is alive and doing a great job,” he said. “This is why the press is failing and it's failing very, very badly."

Andy Borowitz is the New York Times best-selling author of “The 50 Funniest American Writers,” and a comedian who has written for The New Yorker since 1998. He writes the Borowitz Report, a satirical column on the news, for newyorker.com.